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Chipping away at the Political Consensus: Black Lives Matter and American Exceptionalism

(Review: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books: 2015. ) Real America has a Romanian accent and lives in Prague In Eastern Europe there is a specific way in which the class relations and social transformations which have moulded US politics get lost in a glazed landscape of critical opacity. Within the […]

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The Labor Movement in Post-Communist Countries

This article originally appeared on LeftVoice. Philippe Alcoy interviews Mihai Varga, a Romanian specialist on trade unionism in Eastern and Central Europe and author of “Worker Protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine,” published in August 2015. In this interview, Varga provides his vision on the state of the trade unionism in the region after the dissolution […]

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The Ukrainian Government as the Point of Balance between Domestic and Foreign Capital

This article was written a couple of months ago while the future of Ukrainian government was still unsure. I am happy to report that the ensuing events mostly confirmed my predictions: Groisman did take the seat of Prime Minister, Avakov and Petrenko entered the Cabinet and Yatsenyuk gained one more victory over the Parliament, forcing […]

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Poland’s War on Historical Memory

The electoral victory of the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) has initiated a number of changes. Being a conservative party and appealing to right-wing resentments, historical politics were always an important part of the party’s policies. A ‘fair and honest’ historical politics were a way to build a new national identity and […]

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On nurses, strikes, and public sociology

  This article originally appeared on ChangingEmployment.eu by Julia Kubisa on June 08 2016. On 24th May 2016 nurses who work at the Child Health Centre, the major paediatric centre for serious illnesses in Poland, started a strike action. It means that they stopped providing care for their patients – nevertheless the care was provided by head […]

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Bridging the Gap Between Technocracy and Fascism in Croatia

The Croatian political scene has been very lively since the last parliamentary elections held on 8th November 2015. The results of the election left both major centrist parties unable to form a majority government as the nominally left-of-centre coalition led by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) won 56 seats, while the nominally right-of-centre coalition led […]

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The pain goes on: Greece and the European Union (EU)

As the UK’s referendum on the European Union approaches, Greek workers are facing more pain from Greece’s European creditors The Eurozone last week pushed Greece to accept more austerity in exchange for a loan of 7.5 billion euros to pay off the country’s debt. This comes less than a year after Greece was promised debt […]

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New hope for the Balkans, New Formations on the Left

This is the text of a speech by Pavle Ilić – a sociology student at the University of Belgrade, a member of Marks21 in Serbia, and a contributor to LeftEast – that was delivered at the Marx is Muss conference in Berlin earlier this year. Pavle was on the panel entitled New Hope on the Balkan Left, which took place on Saturday, […]

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An Interview with Boris Buden – Antifascism as Platitude

By: Milena Ostojić (this text originally appeared in Lupiga.com). Boris Buden is a cultural theorist, translator, and publicist, currently guest lecturer at the Bauhaus-Weimar Universität. He is widely known for essays originally published in Arkzin, and later in the Barikade collection (two editions). In our conversation with Buden, we interrogated the question of antifascism as a […]

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Free Zdravko and Vladimir! Stop prosecuting protesters in Macedonia!

Zdravko Saveski and Vladimir Kunovski, longtime activists and members of Levica, the recently-formed left-wing party in the Republic of Macedonia, have been kept in house arrest for over a month now. Recently, their detentions have been extended for additional 30 days. They are being detained because of their participation in the anti-regime protests which began […]